The SEOmoz Internal SEO Pre-Launch Checklist - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

As we all know, SEO is a very labor-intensive job. It can be really easy to let some things fall by the wayside even if you know you're supposed to do them but don't have the time. It gets even more complicated when you forget to do them in the first place! Now, Danny is an awesome man of many strengths, but he can be a bit of a forgetful grandmother at times - even he knows that it is important to write down processes so they're easier to replicate in the future. As an early holiday gift to us all, he has decided to spill the optimization beans and share his SEO checklist with the community he loves. Get the details in today's Whiteboard Friday video, and the more general checklist in the post below. Please feel free to share what's on your checklist in the comments below!

Capitalization - Does the page render with Capitalization in URLs? (It should redirect to all lowercase)

Trailing Slash (URL) - Does the page render with a backslash and without a trailing slash in the URL? (It should redirect to the non-backslash version)

Are all of the images in the optimal file format and web optimized? (Files should be as small as possible)Do links without editorial value include nofollow? (They should)

Video Transcription

Hello everybody. My name is Danny Dover. For today's Whiteboard Friday I'm going to show you something very, very special that we use internally -- the SEO cheat sheet for launching a website. We couldn't really think of a good name for it, but that's not the important part. The important part is the content that's on it.

Let me explain where this came from. We have a VP of Product here, his name is Adam Feldstein. A lot of times he'll come to me and there's a page that just needs to go up in the next two hours. Sometimes it's a landing page of some kind. Sometimes it's a marketing page of some kind, and SEO comes in right at the end. Usually what happens is I look at Adam like, "Well, Adam, you know you shouldn't do that." And Adam's like, "Danny, why are talking like your grandma? I don't understand that." The idea is that SEO, of course, is supposed to be within the entire process, the entire product process. You work it in every step of the way. To be fair, at SEOmoz I think we do a good job of that, but sometimes we get these side products, it just has to happen at the end. In those cases, this is the cheat sheet that I go through to make sure everything gets covered.

So, I've very deliberately broken this into two category groups. I have critical on my right. And I have not quite as critical. So, I'm not saying that they're not critical. I'm just saying that they're not quite as critical. So they're all important. The things on my right are the most important things to cover. So let me cover these one by one.

The first one is targeting. I can't emphasis how important this is. A lot of times when I get mockups back, there will be many, many ideas expressed on a single page. Sometimes they'll relate to each other and sometimes they won't. The idea here is in a perfect SEO world, which we don't live in, but if we did, there would be one idea per page. The reason I say that is because from a search engine perspective if there is one idea per page, it is very, very easy to figure out what that page is relevant for. A lot of times when I get these mockups, part of the process is figuring out what is the bigger idea that is trying to be expressed and then targeting that phrase. So, if it is Justin Bieber, if we're working on his home page for example, I don't know why we'd do that. But, if we did, it would be just him as a celebrity or his personal reputation. The concept of Justin Bieber, that is what the homepage of him needs to express. That would be what we would target will all these different things. I'll cover all of these. Once you figure out what you're trying to target, then you need to go through and target them in the correct ways.

The first thing that comes up is the content. We talk about this a lot in SEO. The content is king. If I had a dollar for every time I said that, I'd have a lot of money. Content is extremely important. The content that is on the page is why search engines are indexing in the first place. They act as middlemen or as middle machines as it would be. Real human beings go onto Google and they search with real queries and they are hoping to find content that is written for them about whatever it is they're searching for. So the content needs to be about whatever you're targeting.

Underneath the content is title tag. We've done a lot of research on this at SEOmoz. We've found that title tags are extremely important when it comes to on-page ranking factors. In fact, they're the most important on- page ranking factor from an SEO perspective. Titles tags, what you want to do is have the keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag. I'll link in to a post below that explains all the intricacies and all the subtleties of title tags so you can get a good idea.

After I check over the title tags, I look at the URL. So the ideal, I want the URL to be as short as possible and as semantically clean as possible. Does it make sense? Something like a domain, a category, a subcategory page, and the content. Does it express an idea that makes a lot of sense? So if it's something like SEOmoz.org/content/blogpost/whatever the blog post name is, that would be a cleaner URL. Just for example.

Under the URL, I have meta descriptions. Meta descriptions don't help you at all from a ranking perspective, but they help you with click through on the search engine result pages. This is kind of a way of doing a free ad for search results. I always make sure that we have one of these and it includes again this target phrase that we picked earlier. If it is in there and there is an exact match or a near match, it will bold it in the search engines, which helps which click through rates.

Underneath that, I have rel=canonical. This one has come up a lot more in the last I'd say three months or so than it has before. This is very important. This is a resource the search engines have provided for us that we can tell them what the canonical version of a web page is. You'll see this a lot where tracking parameters mess it up or a trailing slash versus a non-trailing slash on a URL will mess this up. It is very important that you include this here. Actually, at SEOmoz, we're trying to push an initiative through dev to have this on every single one of our pages. That's something that I think will come here in early Q1 201l, making sure that we're making it very clear which is the canonical version of every single page on our website so that link juice doesn't get distributed unevenly.

Underneath rel=canonical we have Alt text. Alt text is a textual representation of an image that you can optionally apply. This is helpful for search engines and for human beings as well. So, human beings that need screen readers or that are using some other alternative method of visualizing web pages, Alt text comes in handy. We have found this, along with title tags, to be an oddly, highly correlated search metric. Alt text, again you're going to want to use the target phrase you chose in the first step.

The last one is internal linking. This is the easiest one to screw up. When you have a new page that is about to launch, it is important to look at all of the things that are on the page itself, but it is also important to look at what pages are linking to it. Guess what? Again, you want those anchor texts to be using that targeted phrase that you came up with in the beginning. If it's the Justin Bieber thing again, you're going to make sure that all of those pages on the rest of your domain are linking to it with the correct anchor text, which is whatever you targeted.

That's the critical stuff. That's what I look through in the first five minutes of going through a new page that is about to launch. The other things that I go through have a lot more subtleties to them. So I've put them into a different category. Sometimes you want them and sometimes you don't, depending on what the situation is. I'll go through each of those independently.

Meta robots. Meta robots is a tool that search engines have provided for us that allows you to either have a page be indexable or have a page not be indexable. It's sort of like robots.txt, although it is a lot cleaner implementation. Let me explain that. With meta robots it gives the option, like I said, of being indexable and non-indexable. It also gives you the option of having all the links on a page followed or no-followed. So whereas with robots.txt you can say, "Google, don't crawl this page," and it won't, with meta robots you can say, "Google, crawl this page. Don't index it, but have all the links on it pass juice." That way any link outward from your domain that you do or any link to a different page on your domain on that web page will still be indexable and will still pass juice. So, I never actually recommend using robots.txt unless you absolutely have to, because the benefits of using meta robots just outweigh it completely. Again, I'll link to this and explain it more fully.

Underneath that, I have meta keywords. Meta keywords are an older SEO tag. In fact, I think it's almost completely useless at this point. This year it came out that Google was not using it, Bing was not using it, and Yahoo came out and said that they were not using it, although Danny Sullivan proved that they actually were using it. What happened now is that it doesn't really matter that Yahoo is using it because all Yahoo search results are getting transferred over to Bing search results. Meta keywords are actually not going to help you. It's one of those things where not only will it not help you, it could also potentially hurt you. You're giving your competitors valuable information by providing meta keywords. You're saying these are the keywords that are important for me to target on these pages. You don't want to do that. You're spending time to help out your competitors, which is something you want to avoid at all times. The best argument I've heard against this is that with meta keywords sometimes they can help you on some social sites. I really haven't seen it on any of the big social sites. On some, like, some very niche sites, meta keywords can help you. Really, the bottom line for me is it is not worth your time to go through and add those on each of your pages. So, I never recommend doing that.

H1. H1 is one I go back and forth with a lot with different SEOs. The idea behind an H1 is that you are using HTML headers to explain to the search engines and to different protocols how information relates to other information on the page. So, with H1s we found from a pure ranking perspective they actually don't help you very much. We think this is because they've been abused a lot in the past. But the problem with just going out and saying that and making that the best practice is that H1s are actually very helpful for users. If you go to a blog, it makes a lot of sense that the H1 will be the title of the blog post. This is what the entire page is about, so this will be the H1. I totally agree with that. That is how it should be. From a strict rankings perspective, H1 is probably not going to help you very much. Maybe not even at all. But for users it helps a lot. I recommend you include them, but don't put a huge amount of emphasis on them.

Underneath that is cloaking. Cloaking is something that usually comes up by accident, although some mischievous people do it on purpose. Cloaking is showing one thing to search engines and showing something completely different to normal users. This comes up a lot on our website when we have one version that is being shown to logged in users and one version that is being shown to non-logged in users. A search engine cannot log in. It doesn't have credentials and it can't operate that way. So it is very important to figure out exactly what the search engines are going to see and make sure that other offline users are also seeing the same thing. If you're ever in a situation where you are targeting something based on user agent, say in Googlebot, you probably don't want to be doing that. Try to avoid it in most cases. There are some very limited hyperlocal exceptions to that, but feel free to ask questions in the comments if you want me to expand on that at all.

Capitalization. So, I'm actually going to group capitalization together with trailing slash. These are again talking about subtleties of URLs. Capitalization is if you are going to include capitals in a URL, and trailing slash is if you have something like www.SEOmoz.org/WhiteboardFriday/. If you have that trailing slash, that page will render, at least on our servers, that will render along with the page without the trailing slash. This is a mistake. This is something that we are going through and fixing. I think a lot of people make this mistake, actually. The problem with this is you're creating duplicate content. The same thing can happen with capitalization. If the URL has some capitals in it and you can also render the same page at a version that does not have the capitals in it, you are going to have duplicate content. These are two things I take a look at when I'm going through a web page that needs to go out into production into the next hour or so. I make sure they do not have these two things.

If you have any more questions, you want to expand on this at all, or you have anything I've forgotten, please comment in the comments below. I appreciate your time. I'll see you next week on Whiteboard Friday. Thank you.

If you have any tips or tricks that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

About AaronWheeler —
Aaron is an Associate and former manager of the Help Team at Moz. He's usually thinking about how to scale customer service in a way that keeps customers delighted. You'll also find him reading sci-fi, watching HBO, cooking up vegan eats, and drinking down whiskey treats!

I've found that internal linking is absolutely fundamental to ranking success so I'd have put it a bit higher on the critical list!

If I have a site where keyword is used within the existing nav structure or within the existing in-content linking strategy to the wrong page, I've seen drastic improvement in rankings by pointing this to the correct target URL or removing altogether. I've seen some instances where a ranking has gone straight to Page 1 just by fixing this up.

All of my SEO's use a checklist similar to this for every Client implementation (it's a bit bigger actually :p) - I'll add a few extra's here over the weekend that could help a few folks. Perhaps the not-so-not-so critical list! :)

I've found Bing's support for the canonical tag to be rather poor with respect to capitalization. They keep sending visitors to the wrong URLs despite those URLs having canonical tags that list the proper URL that we use for internal linking.

The canonical tag is useful, but I find it better to take every step possible to not have multiple possible URLs showing the same content.

Particularly with an ecommerce site it is sometimes inevitable that there will be more than one url pointing to same content/page.

There is the direct url to product page itself with the possibility of additional urls from category page or in some case the product may be listed in several categories. And, then there are urls created by filter options and other types of options pointing as same page. The end result could be a good many urls for the same page.

In the above case setting a canonical tag makes a lot of sense and helps internal linking to pass the benefit to the one page.

I think the safest way to do canonical is to literally for that article 'id' add new column in the table and write canonical url and always use it from the database, never try to 'generate it' in the script

Regarding capitalization, how do you guys handle it (besides the use of the canonical)? Like Apple.com does, responding with a 404 when the wrong capitalization is used ? http://www.apple.com/Itunes/ (404) vs. http://www.apple.com/itunes/ (200) (note that http://www.apple.com/iTunes/ responds with a 301)

The wiki pages became the SEO Best practices you can now see linked to in the checklist above. They are difficult to find on the website now but we have a redesign of the Learn SEO page in the works that should fix this.

Regarding www vs non-www, as you mentioned this doesn't really come up when I am auditing a single page but I agree it is very important!

I definitely agree - choosing your subdomain seems to be a quite commonly overlooked decision. I see a lot of customers with duplicate www and non-www homepages, uncanonicalized and without redirection. I feel for them! Much easier to get this figured out beforehand.

Good checklist to get internal SEO up to standard. I like the use of a dynamic canonical link element that can help if for some reason the redirects do not work to give priority to the correct version of homepage url.

Been looking into the trailing slash issue, and I can't find any example of google, yahoo or bing indexing the same page twice because of this. If you ask me a page either get's indexed with or without the trailing slash, but never twice.

Ofcourse I agree it's best practice and cleaner if you make a website without trailing slashes, but I don't think it's a duplicate content problem?

A great list. I think I've avoided almost all the pitfalls in the article except for the internal links. I'm still never sure how many is too many, or even what impact internal links actually have on my site. I've been told that too many internal links will make search engines ignore you, but then I've also been told that not enough internal links means the search engines will never find you. Any suggestions?

When has Bing said they don't support the keyword tag any more? I have searched and searched but come up with nothing other than SEOs claiming they ignore it.

The last "semi-official" word from Bing that I could dig up on it was at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/07/18/head-s-up-on-lt-head-gt-tag-optimization-sem-101.aspx - that page no longer seems to exist but you can find it cached with GG. (It's over a year old obviously, and written by a Bing blogger, not exactly an insider.)

I don't expect the keyword tag to do much for you and I personally feel it's a waste of time. Everyone claims that Bing authoritatively does not use it - but I have not seen indication of anywhere (a study, a statement from them, etc).

Hey, thanks about bringing up the capitalization issue regarding duplicate content. Sometimes I use the word URL /toner-BUNDLE in capital letters because I feel it's a good conversion word. Nobody types it in the search query; however, I use it a lot in eCommerce. So I am since I capitalized the word BUNDLE, that particular webpage now has duplicate content.

Regarding the trailing slash, If I understand right, the reason why you shouldn't have a trailing slash in the url is because with that you suggest for search engines that it is a directory and not page. Is that correct?

So would the following be a good practice?

Use trailing slash on category and tags pages, eg.: www.somedomain.com/category/ and www.somedoamin.com/tag/

Do not use a trailing slash for posts: www.somedomain.com/category/post-title

Maybe I'm I wrong but I think that would only confuse users and/or search engines. After all, you will see some kind of content at "site.com/post" and again some kind of different content at "site.com/images/". It doesn't matter to me whether it is a post, category, folder or something else. It is a different page, that's all that matters. So they should all end the same.

I'm using something like this:

if(substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], -1) != '/'){

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header("Location: ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/');

exit();

}

This way everything in my site ends with a trailing slash. If somewhere in my navigation I accidentally skip the trailing slash these few lines correct and preserve my logic (my .htaccess file allows both urls with or without trailing slash). This way PHP makes sure there is no mistake with duplicate content.

If there is a rule that url without trailing slash in the end is BETTER than the one with a trailing slash - please someone let me know. :)

Quick question: would having separate homepages for separate regions be considered cloaking? A user from CA (who had previously indicated that they were a CA user) will see a different homepage than our CO users and I want to make sure we're not harming our SEO rankings...?

Homepage keywords are also picked up by sites that automatically collect information about your site, such as http://www.aboutthedomain.com. For one of my sites, I see that there are 30 or more such websites linking to it, and many display the keywords along with a link to my site. Some of these sites even use the keywords to create"tags, which create additional relevant links to the page on their site about your site.

If speed is getting in a way of usability and conversions I would definitely jump on it and fix ASAP. But if we're talking about subtle improvements in speed than I wouldn't be too worried. If page speed is (or to become) a factor, wouldn't other signals (such as links) will outweigh it? For example you'd be much better of looking after internal or inbound links than spending the equal amount of time tweaking speed to a marginally higher performance.

I agree that optimizing for page speed is important. While it technically is a ranking factor right now (at least in Google) I think the bigger benefit is for the users. From a single page perspective, like the above list, I would focus on something actionable like image optimization. (Correct file type and compression so that file sizes are small)

As the internet goes more mobile, I think that page speed is going to become more of an important signal for obvious reasons. And as you say image optimization will probably get you the bulk of the squeeze. But moving forward compacting css and js are going to be equally important I think, and will deserve a place on the list maybe in 2012. And checking rendering on mobile devices maybe as well.

If I am not wrong, this topic has been discussed here too in the past... and it seems it is not a problem to use the canonical in the same page which Url is the canonical, even though the main use is on those pages that we want the SE to not index.

craigaddyman, gfiorelli1 On an enterprise-level SEO situation, the canonical tag has the potential to quickly fix massive dupe content problems... I asked the developers at the British Council to run it through all pages over a network of more than 150 country/project sites...in a couple weeks all url dupe content problems vanished, particularly the nasty capitalisation ones often caused by IIS.

The canonical is real problem sorter in my experience. The only I wasnt sure about is whether it would harness the link juice value of the duplicates and I asked this question on the Q&A as I found it hard to believe it would act as a 301... I was told yes, the value is being passed to the canonical version

"Wade Leftwich said...And I assume it's OK for the canonical page to have a 'link ' pointing to itself?

@Wade: Yes, it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential . It won't harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you."

I think you are close. At SEOmoz we want are trying to add it ti every page on the site. So for a canonical version it will be pointing at itself but for all other version of the same page it will be pointing at the canonical version.

Take for example this page. RIght now the rel canonical poinits to itself but if you add tracking parameters to the URL, it will continue pointing at the canonical version. That is exactly the behavior we want.

Great job Danny, thanks! I wold like to share my opinion about h1. For my personal experiencie, I think h1 will not be important for indexing, but it would a bit important for ranking.

First of all, a lot of webs have a more than one h1 on a singular page. That's an error for the HTML perspective, but also I think is sending Google some noise about what the main idea of the page is.

Second, I think the h1 tag should be the first content to appear when googlebot crawls the page. That means, for example, in a blog, put the header (no the tag) with the blog title with position absolute at the top of the page, but the actual code at the end of the page, so the h1 with the title of the blog post is the first HTML code that appears. With that, the user is getting a "cool" webpage, even if the order of the code is not exactly what the user is seeing. It needs some CSS coding, but I think it's worth.

What about page size? When designing landing pages, there are a lot of people who say a long page is acceptable. Even in SEOmoz's test from a few years back the landing page was crazy long! It that still ok? Should we be looking to shorten our pages because of Google looking at page speed?

I don't think you should shorten your pages because Google's looking at page speed. Unless you have a really slow server and/or bunch of high quality images I wouldn't do that. Text take barely no time to load and I often see rich content pages without much links ranking first page between pages with thousands of link but not much content.

Danny regarding Meta Keywords you said: “You're giving your competitors valuable information by providing Meta keywords. You're saying these are the keywords that are important for me to target on these pages.” We use WordPress for all our client sites and the Tags are visible on each article on their sites. Based on what you’re saying about Meta Keywords I’m now thinking we are making a mistake? Am I making it too easy for competitors to figure out what keywords my clients are trying to rank for?

Personally, I wouldn't worry much about it. You're going to be targeting some broad phrases and some very specific phrases. Your competitors aren't going to know which ones convert and which don't until they put the time in to test themselves. And even then, they still have to beat you.

In any rate, it's never some big secret as far as what a site is trying to rank for on any given page. It's normally immediately obvious.

I think it really depends on what your tags are and what you're targetting. If you're selling blue widgets, and your tags are blue AND widgets that's not a big deal, but say that page is targetting a nice keyword that you happened to find such as "affordable 1000hp blue widgets" and that's your tag, then yes you're probably making a mistake, albeit a minor one.

My only other comment is I wouldn't spend the time inputting the keywords in Wordpress. If it auto-generating them it probably won't make a difference but if it is a manual process I would stop doing it going forward. Put those resources somewhere more important.

Define "very niche" sites. I often wonder if they are indeed helping me at all on my sites, all of which are niche. Guess I need to do some testing but I don't want to break what isn't currently broken.

Is there any other harm is putting them in, other than competitors finding out what kw's you are targetting?